After spending over 50 years on and around the water, I have realized that without strong fisheries laws and effective conservation measures, the future of salt water fishing, and America's living marine resources, is dim. Yet conservation is given short shrift by national angling organizations and the angling press. I hope that this blog will incite, inform and inspire salt water fishermen to reclaim their traditional role as the leading advocates for the conservation of America's fisheries.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

ONE COAST, ONE RULE

Fisheries management can be a complicated and sometimes
confusing business. Here on the East
Coast, one of the more complicated and often confusing concepts is that of
“conservation equivalency,” as practiced by the Atlantic States Marine
Fisheries Commission.

It comes into play after ASMFC has adopted a set of
management measures as part of a fishery management plan. In order to comply with such plan, all states
must either adopt the precise measures proposed by ASMFC, or come up with
alternate measures that have the same conservation effect—have “conservation
equivalency”—pass muster with the relevant Technical Committee and are approved
by the appropriate species Management Board.

“If the [Fishery Management Plan so provides, procedures
under which the states my implement and enforce alternate management measures
that achieve conservation equivalency”

must be included in such plan.

The same Charter defines “conservation equivalency” as

“Actions take by a state which differ from the specific
requirements of the [Fishery Management Plan], but which achieve the same
quantified level of conservation for the resource under management. For example, various combinations of size
limits, gear restrictions, and season length can be demonstrated to achieve the
same targeted level of fishing mortality.
The appropriate Management Board/Section will determine conservation
equivalency.”

“During the development of a management document, the Plan
Development Team (PDT) has the responsibility to recommend if conservation
equivalency should be permitted for that species…The PDT should consider stock
status, data availability, range of the species, socio-economic information,
and the potential for more conservative management when stocks are overfished
or overfishing is occurring when making a recommendation on conservation
equivalency. [emphasis added]

And thus the can of worms is opened…

I need to say at the start that, under some circumstances,
conservation equivalency can be a very good thing.

The best example of that may be seen in the
recreational summer flounder fishery, where fish are both larger and more
abundant toward the northern end of their range, and a single, coastwide size
limit would work a real and unnecessary hardship on states in the southern
mid-Atlantic.

Given the solid biological basis for differing state
regulations, it’s hard to question the wisdom of invoking conservation
equivalency.

Conservation equivalency also seems to have worked with scup. More than 90% of the harvest is taken by New
York, Connecticut, Rhode island and Massachusetts, and a large portion of that
comes from waters between Long Island’s East End and the “elbow” of Cape Cod,
where boats from multiple states often anchor up within sinker-throwing
distance of one another.

Under such
conditions, it makes sense for the same set of regulations to apply to all
anglers from the quad-state region.

But does it make sense for
the rest of the coast to fish under different regulations?

In the aggregate, anglers in New York, Connecticut, Rhode
Island and Massachusetts landed about 4,500,000 scup in 2015. Anglers on the rest of the coast accounted
for around 34,000, with more than 31,000 of those fish coming from New Jersey.

While adopting conservation equivalency for scup probably doesn't cause any harm, it’s also hard to argue that doing so does any significant good.

Things reallyh start to get problematic when conservation
equivalency is invoked for purely “socio-economic” reasons.

I’ve said before that if my involvement with
fisheries issues has taught me anything, it’s that if folks try hard enough,
they can always find a reason to do the wrong thing. Just about everybody can come up with a reason to kill too many fish.

As a lot of folks know, striped bass are a migratory fish,
that travel for hundreds of miles up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Although there are small spawning populations
in a number of rivers between North Carolina and Maine, most of the coastal
migratory stock is spawned in Chesapeake Bay, with other smaller, but still
important, spawning areas in the Hudson River and the Delaware River estuary.

Once mature and a part of the coastal migratory population,
an individual striped bass may migrate from wintering grounds off North
Carolina all the way up to Maine and back south again in the course of a single
year.

Striped bass abundance is largely driven by the success of
the annual spawn, which in turn seems driven, at least in Chesapeake Bay, by
environmental conditions. Cold winters
followed by wet springs tend to produce large year classes, while warm winters
and dry springs have led to the smallest year classes on record.

When the same fish are traveling through the waters of
multiple states, there is no biological justification for regulations that subject those fish to different rules as they travel from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

“The technical committee does not have a specific
recreational management option, but does remind the board that more simple management
measures have been successful when managing striped bass in the past.”

In other words, gauging the effectiveness of uncomplicated
management measures—say, a 1-fish bag limit and 28-inch minimum size—applied coastwide
is relatively simple. Give states the
freedom to adopt slot limits, a second “trophy” fish or other alternate
management measures, and things get a lot more complicated.

But, of course, that doesn’t stop states from trying to
connive ways to increase their own anglers’ kill.

At that October 2014 meeting, Adam Nowalsky, the legislative proxy
from New Jersey, set the tone early when he stated, soon after the meeting
began

“I think we just need to be very clear on the record for the
audience that the options we select today may not be the options that
individual states implement and that phrase ‘all jurisdictions will implement’
really only means in the absence of them bringing forward a conservation
equivalent proposal, and I just wanted confirmation of that.”

It was certainly very clear, from his statement, that even if the
Management Board adopted a 1-fish bag limit, or other conservative measures,
New Jersey had no intention of going along.

New Jersey's intent was reinforced later in the meeting, when
Mr. Nowalsky tried to convince the Management Board to adopt no specific
management measures at all, but rather made a motion that

“the states submit for technical review and board approval
conservation equivalency proposals for 2015 that achieve the 25 percent and
20.5 percent reductions for the coastal and Chesapeake Bay recreational fisheries,
respectively.”

He justified his motion, which was amended to merely address
the coastal fishery, by saying

“States are expected to come forward with proposals,
anyway. By selecting one of the
proposals here tonight, I believe we’re doing ourselves an injustice in two
areas. One, we’re setting an expectation
with the public that all states are going to come back with that regulation
exactly. If we go ahead and come for a
proposal for a one-fish limit, let’s say, and most states come back with two-fish
conservation proposals, then you’re going to have an outcry from the public
about why we’re allowing that.

“Secondly, I believe that the column that is in the table [of
management options] on the right-hand side that describes a specific percentage
associated with each of the specific options would also serve to be misleading
when our conservation proposals are going to come back at the 25 percent target
and not the numbers that are higher up to 31 percent in the column.”

It’s a telling comment.

Mr. Nowalsky had no regard for
the overwhelming public support for a one-fish bag limit. Even if the Management Board adopted such a limit, he expected “most states,”
which certainly would include New Jersey, to ignore the will of the angling
public and support a bigger kill, even if doing so led to an “outcry” from a
public that he clearly held in contempt.

In addition, he was making it manifest that, even if the
Management Board adopted a more conservative measure, anglers in states which did the
right thing and followed that board’s advice would be put at a disadvantage when compared to those in states which adopted conservation equivalency, where any
harvest reduction would be limited to the minimum 25 percent required by the Management Board.

When you think about it, that’s a pretty troubling message,
on a number of levels.

Mr. Nowalsky’s motion didn’t fly, and was
quickly amended. But the amendment was a
little strange; it would have set a 1-fish bag and 32-inch minimum size, but
still allow any conservation equivalent proposals to only achieve a 25%
reduction.

David Simpson, the fisheries director from Connecticut,
quickly saw the problem with that, and made an eloquent case against
conservation equivalency, saying

“I’m concerned it is going undermine one of the most
desirable features of striped bass management, and that has been consistency
among states…one at 32…is probably, I’m going to guess a 40 percent
reduction…

“[Y]ou’re adding four more inches to 28 and [1 fish at 28
inches is a] 31 percent [reduction], or almost half of that by conservation
equivalency; we’re all going to go home and be under a great deal of pressure
to do something different. Even if we
don’t, our neighbors will…we’re going to end up three different sets of rules
within a 3.5 mile radius of [where the meeting was held in Mystic,
Connecticut]. I would be OK with [1 fish at 32 inches], certainly,but
not with its conservation equivalency.
[emphasis added]”

However, the Management Board didn’t heed his wise words,
and ultimately adopted recommended regulations that included a 1-fish bag and
28-inch minimum size on the coast, which would theoretically reduce fishing mortality
by 31%, but set the conservation equivalency
standard at 25%.

For the
recreational fishery in Chesapeake Bay, no management measures were recommended
at all; regulations merely needed to achieve a conservation equivalency of
20.5%.

Nearly two years later, we know how that turned out.

Most coastal states adhered to the 1 fish bag and 28-inch
minimum size recommended by ASMFC. Collectively,
they achieved a fishing mortality reduction of 41%, somewhat better than
the 31% predicted. However, New Jersey,
which always intended to ignore the recommended management measures in favor of
conservation equivalency, didn’t come close to matching the performance of the
other states.

Reducing its fishing
mortality by a mere 18.7%, it failed to meet even the minimum standard of 25%.

Yet New Jersey did well compared to the Chesapeake Bay
states. Not only didn’t they come close
to reducing their fishing mortality by 20.5%, but they didn’t reduce it at
all.

And that probably says all that we need to know about
adopting conservation equivalency for “socio-economic” reasons, because “socio-economic
reasons” is just another way to say “killing more fish.”

When conservation equivalency is adopted for biological reasons,
those biological factors tend to limit the catch in a way that makes alternate
regulations truly “equivalent” to those recommended by ASMFC.

However, conservation equivalent regulations adopted for “socio-economic”
reasons are rarely anything more than a way to game the management system, allowing states to manipulate the data in a manner that will increase their
anglers’ kill.

Thus, it is well past time for ASMFC to take a hard look at
how conservation equivalency is used in its management plan, and to adopt a
firm policy of “One Coast, One Rule” unless the biology of the managed stock
dictates otherwise.